DIOGENES: In Search Of An Honest Politician!

DIOGENES invites you to pull up a chair on this rainy day and read
posts from around the world.
The writing may lean to the right...but that's the way Diogenes wants it!
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but Diogenes rarely changes his! WELCOME!

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

The Republican Party’s Amazing Race; Trump is bringing it all together

It was inevitable. Mixing a pop-icon like Donald Trump with a primary process that started with so many contestants had to produce a kind of Republican Party “Amazing Race.”
To the great embarrassment of the GOPe, the entry of Donald Trump has re-cast their primary process from an orderly procession to an “honorable defeat” to a larger version of The Amazing Race.
Like the Republican primaries (TRP), The Amazing Race (TAR) begins with a large number of entries. Like the Republican primaries, TAR contestants start out as friends. They know somebody will be sent home early but the strong teams know who their real competition is and they know they are not going home yet.
Like The Amazing Race, TRP has its Rick Perrys and Bobby Jindals who are sent away before any real alliances are made. In the ensuing weeks, as becomes necessary, TAR sees alliances between teams. For example, a strong team will select a weak team for the purpose of helping rather than attacking each other. That way, a lone team that might have had a chance against the others had they remained alone, can be forced out. Alliances create strength and staying power.
TRP have gone this way to some extent. Some of the plausible candidates like Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina were content to watch Trump beat the brains out of Jeb Bush. They knew that when he is finished and Bush is eliminated he will come after one of them, but like TAR they’ll take it because it keeps them in the race.
Unlike TAR, the Republican Primaries are subject to outside interference, which in this case will merely hold off the inevitable...

Here's the scene last week: Army Delta Force troops, in boots on the ground in Iraq, swooping into an ISIS prison camp along with Kurdish and Iraqi soldiers. The mission: Free more than five dozen Kurdish and Iraqi captives believed in imminent danger of mass execution.
In the darkness, a fierce firefight erupts. The Kurdish and Iraqi break-in stalls. The experienced Special Ops guys, who happen to be heavily-armed in body armor, night-vision goggles and full combat gear, open up. Numerous ISIS troops fall. So does one U.S. operative, Master Sgt. Joshua Wheeler, a veteran of 14 deployments. They breach the buildings. Prisoners are freed. Valuable intell gathered.
As choppers whop-whop away, smart bombs whistle in out of the night. Prison camp disappears.
All this, according to the silly parlance and ridiculous rationale of Obama administration officials, is not real combat.
How, normal people might inquire, is a blazing firefight with fatalities and large explosions not really combat?
Because these officials are once again unfortunate hostages to yet another unfortunate statement by Barack Obama. Remember the red line in Syria? The ObamaCare promises? Again, contemporary reality must be twisted to conform to Obama's past rhetoric.
...
On Monday, Obama's press secretary, Josh Earnest, took a very deep breath and sought desperately to avoid creating a sound-bite containing the word "combat":

President Barack Obama endorsed the #Black Lives Matter movement “as something we have to take seriously.” Even though after seven years, Obama has done nothing to improve the lives of black Americans, his most loyal, boot-licking constituents. In contrast, Obama helped give homosexuals gay marriage and illegal aliens, amnesty.

Blacks are poorer, more criminalized and uneducated than they were before the first black president was elected in 2008. Congressional Black Caucus Chairman G.K. Butterfield admitted as much, lamenting that in 2015 the black race finds itself in “a state of emergency.”

Butterfield said:

• 25% of black households live below the poverty line, as compared to eight percent for white households.

• The unemployment rate of African Americans has consistently been twice as high as for whites over the last 50 years.

• For every $100 in wealth of a white household, the black household only has $6 in wealth.

Yet suddenly, after his presidency has nearly come to an end, Obama wants to address the “real” problem plaguing blacks, who voted over 90% for him in 2008 and 2012. After a White House forum on criminal justice, Obama said:

"I think the reason that the organizers used the phrase 'Black Lives Matter' was not because they were suggesting nobody else's lives matter. Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a specific problem that's happening in the African-American community that's not happening in other communities. And that is a legitimate issue that we've got to address."

(It’s insulting to refer to blacks as “one community” because we come from different socio-economic backgrounds, just like whites. Liberals don’t refer to whites as the “white community,” but rather the white race.)

Obama is correct. There is a serious problem happening in the black race in America and it’s not police officers killing black men, as he falsely implied.

The real problem is black men killing each other and committing more violent crime than whites. And this is compounded by the collapse of the black family. Citing data form the Children’s Defense Fund, black journalist Juan Williams noted that “Murders with guns are the No. 1 cause of death for African-American men between the ages of 15 and 34.”

“The 44,038 black children killed by guns since 1979 (when national data on the age of gun violence victims was first collected) is ‘nearly 13 times more’ than all the black people killed by lynching in the 86-year period of 1882 to 1968,” Williams added.

In 2012, the Violence Policy Center found the homicide victim rate for black males was nearly 10 times that of white males at 32.78 for 100,000 blacks compared to 3.86 for 100,000 whites.

Evidence clearly demonstrates black lives don’t matter to black people despite the lie Obama is trying to sell to make “his people happy.”

In 2009, incarceration rates for black men were 6.4 times the rate of white men. While blacks represent only 13% of the population, they account for 38% of the federal and state prison population.

Of course the real problem of violence among blacks is a symptom of the broader, more insidious issue that more than 70% of black babies are born out of wedlock to single mothers and absent fathers who can’t or won’t parent their children. In the early 1960s, about 23% of black babies were born to single women, according to The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, a report by then Assistant Labor Department Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat who served under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

This generational pathology has led to hoards of directionless, young black men turning to crime rather than education and work. Instead of seeing grown men in their lives holding down jobs, they see men holding guns. In predominately black cities like Chicago and DC, governed by Democrats, homicides are raging out of control. And the problem isn’t guns. It’s black thugs with guns. In the past 12 months, homicides have doubled in DC. Chicago has the highest number of homicides with 235 recorded to date, and the police department has seized over 3,400 illegal firearms -- even though Illinois has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation.

“The CBC was formed in 1971 because its founders understood that Black lives matter. Black boys matter. Black girls matter. The Black family matters,” observed Butterfield in his 2015 as incoming Chairman of the CBC. If this was really true, why is it that after 50 years of black Americans voting solidly Democrat, blacks’ lives haven’t improved?

Obama lectured reporters at the White House that the problem facing young black men in America are “real and there's a history behind it and we have to take it seriously." Indeed, and Obama should heed his own advice and stop lying about the facts to placate the angry black mob. The truth is the Black Lives Matter movement is nonsense. The people killing black men with impunity like savages aren't cops, but other black men. It’s about time Obama and Democrats admit this. Instead, Democrat presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton give lip service to a movement to win black votes and do nothing about solving black problems.

Women Have Suffered More Under Obama Policies

Now that Hillary Clinton has, by default, sewn up the Democratic nomination, expect Democrats to play the gender card for all its worth. In August, Clinton lashed out at the GOP field: "extreme views on women, we expect from some of the terrorist groups ... but it's a little hard to take from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States."

So much for cleaning up the harsh partisan discourse in Washington.

Clinton's "gender equity" agenda includes family-leave legislation and a federal mandate requiring that women receive equal pay. This from a senator, from 2002-2008, who paid her female staffers 72 cents for every dollar paid to males, or $15,708 less than the median salary for a man, according to an analysis of data from official Senate expenditure reports.

The strategy here is to try to continue to exploit the gender gap that widened in the past two presidential elections. In 2012, Barack Obama won 57 percent of the women's vote. Obama has done especially well with single women, winning 66 percent in 2012.

But it may not work this time around, and here's why. Working women have gotten crushed under the weight of Obama policies. During Barack Obama's six-and-a-half years in office, women have suffered steeper declines in take-home pay than men have. Women have also experienced sharper declines in employment and a faster rise in poverty. The financial squeeze has been especially severe for single women.

Last month, the Census Bureau reported on income and poverty through 2014. It's not a pretty picture. The median-income household has lost nearly $1,300 in income after inflation under Obamanomics.

It's worse for women. Since President Obama took office in 2009, median inflation-adjusted income for women has fallen by nearly 4 cents on the dollar, according to Census data, versus slight gains for men.

On Obama's watch, an additional 2 million women have slipped into poverty. Wait a minute -- this is supposed to be an economic recovery. The poverty rate among women is now 16.1 percent -- the highest level in 20 years.

The Great Recession was the main factor that plunged families into poverty but, six years later, poverty rates have failed to return to normal levels. The poverty rate among single mothers of children under age 18 (39.8 percent) is nearly double that of single fathers (22 percent), and that gap haswidened under Obama's reign.

It's well-known that labor force participation has fallen to its lowest level since 1978. What's lesser known is that the biggest decline in employment has been among women. The labor-force participation rate for females is now 56.4 percent, the lowest in more than 25 years.

In the 1980s and '90s, millions of women voluntarily entered the labor force and earned rising incomes. Over the past decade, that progress has stalled out. An all-time high of 57 million women over the age of 16 are out of the labor force today and not collecting a paycheck. All those Obama stimulus programs and more than $7 trillion of red ink added to the national debt haven't put women back to work.

Liberals counter that the gap between women's wages and men's wages has narrowed in the past five years. But the major explanation for this is that so many fewer women are in jobs now. Women who fall out of the workforce tend to be at the lower end of the income scale -- so perversely, the gender gap appears to have fallen. This statistical illusion hides the reality that, for millions of women not able to find work under the Obama recovery, their earnings have fallen to zero.

There are a multitude of unforced policy errors that explain why the U.S. economy has pummeled workers. Obama has hobbled the economy with punitive tax rates, $7 trillion in new debt, minimum-wage hikes, regulatory overreach and Obamacare. Women have been the front-line victims of these failed policies.

What should give all of us pause -- and especially women -- is that if you listen closely to the policy ideas of Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, they sound very much like they are promising four more years of all this. That really would be a war against women!

Marines' women in combat study 'flawed,' researchers say

A Marine Corps study examining the impact of integrating women into combat occupations is “inherently flawed” for failing to establish basic standards for such positions, say researchers who obtained the report, which has not been publicly released.

About 400 male and 100 female Marines participated in the Ground Combat Element Integrated Task Force study, which was conducted from October 2014 to July 2015 at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and Twentynine Palms, Calif.

In September, the Marines released an executive summary that said women in the study sustained significantly higher injury rates than men, were less accurate with infantry weapons and had more difficulty moving “wounded” troops off the battlefield.

The release of the synopsis immediately led to questions about its methodology and calls for publication of the full report, particularly after reports that the top Marine Corps command recommended keeping some combat positions closed to women.

There has been bipartisan pressure to release the full report from two Marine Corps veterans in Congress, Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., and Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass. Klein has called for its immediate release for “review by members of Congress and the American people.”

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who has seen the full study, wrote in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post in late September that the analysis relied on “1992 language,” even as “the way we fight and the landscape of our battles has significantly evolved from a quarter-century ago.”

The study, he wrote, did not evaluate the performance of individual female Marines and instead used only averages that “have no relevance to the abilities and performance of individual Marines.”

Defense Secretary Ash Carter has received recommendations from the service branches on which positions should remain off-limits to women; he is expected to make a final decision early next year.

Two researchers — Ellen Haring, a retired Army colonel and senior fellow at Women in International Security in Washington, and Megan MacKenzie, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney in Australia — are vocal advocates for the full integration of women into combat roles. They say the executive summary failed to convey shortcomings and caveats in the full study they obtained.

“From a research perspective, there’s almost nothing you could reliably draw from this research,” said MacKenzie, who has published two books about women in combat, most recently “Beyond the Band of Brothers: The U.S. Military and the Myth that Women Can’t Fight.”

“The volunteer selection was poor. The physical screening was poor. The consistency and number of people they put in each of the groups was very varied,” she said.

Asked about issues raised by MacKenzie and Haring, the Pentagon’s Devine said in a statement: “Successful integration of women into currently closed positions will take time to get right and requires all the services to be thoughtful and deliberate as the process unfolds. Speculation on the release of information or the nature of Military Department Secretary recommendations and inputs is not appropriate at this time. Our research effort was built upon scientific method and experience, to ensure we continue to maintain our high standards and preserve the quality of our All Volunteer Force.”

The study’s central flaw, MacKenzie and Haring say, is that it failed to establish occupation-relevant standards for Marine combat positions.

“The fact that the Marines chose to do a $36 million study that didn’t establish any standards is, I think, interesting in itself,” MacKenzie said. “We still don’t have combat-specific standards in the Marines. Once you’re in the Marines, the only qualification you need to be in an infantry [military occupational specialty] is to be a man.”

The study pitted all-male groups against integrated groups in physically challenging tasks — some combat-related, some not. That design created a “race with no finish line,” MacKenzie said.

“We know that some teams performed faster than others, but we don’t know if any of them performed adequately or all of them performed adequately,” she said. “We just know some were faster, and so the Marines concluded that the teams that were faster were better. But it doesn’t tell us if they were adequate at performing combat-related activities.”

MacKenzie and Haring criticize the executive summary for not mentioning the report’s conclusion that “gender integration, in and of itself, will not have a significant impact on unit morale.”

“It counters one of the biggest arguments in keeping women out of combat: that they spoil the alchemy of the ‘band of brothers,’” MacKenzie said.

The study also ignored the accomplishments of certain women “who were just amazing physically,” MacKenzie said.

“In fact, there was one woman who outperformed men consistently, just an outlier throughout the whole study,” she said. “There were quite a few women above the 50th percentile. There were all these indicators that there were physically superior women who performed well; it’s just that the Marines focused on how the women performed as a group.”

The full study also noted that had the female participants been properly screened for physical fitness before entering the study, the male/female injury rates would likely have been similar, she said.

“There are members of Congress who want this study,” MacKenzie said. “There’s a very heated debate between the Marines and the Secretary of the Navy about whether women should be in combat and whether this study is legitimate. I think in many ways the release of this study should help settle that debate.”

The number one killer of black Americans

You won’t believe what the number one killer of black Americans is.
It isn’t heart disease, it isn’t cancer, it isn’t homicide and it isn’t motor vehicle accidents.
In fact, the number one killer of black Americans is abortion.
Despite a lack of reporting by California, New Hampshire and Maryland, a total of 730,322 abortions were reported to the CDC in 2011, the most recently published reporting year.
405,994 of these reported abortions included cross-classified race/ethnicity data for 2011, of which 146,856 were reported to be black American abortions, equaling about 36 percent of the total number of abortions with reported race statistics.
So, what do these numbers mean?
Let’s break it down.

Why Does the Republican Party Bother to Exist?

A few months back I asked the question of the Republican Party - If you can't make a story as black and white as the killing of Kate Steinle part of the debate over illegal immigration, why do you even bother to exist? Recent events have me asking the same question again: First off, revisiting the killing of Kate Steinle, National Review's Mark Krikorian reports:

Sure enough, Senate Democrats voted to prevent debate on a bill to rein in sanctuary cities that shield illegal-alien criminals from deportation. The final tally was 54-45, short of the 60 votes needed just to proceed to debate on the bill. Manchin and Donnelly were the only Democrats to vote for it, Kirk the only Republican to vote against. (Graham didn’t vote.)So when Illinois Democrat Luis Gutierrez, the most strident anti-borders voice in the House, called the murder of Kate Steinle in the sanctuary city of San Francisco “a little thing,” he seems to have been speaking for his party. The only question now is whether Republicans will even try to make this a campaign issue. Cruz probably will, since he took to the Senate floor before the vote to urge its passage, but it will take more than that. Will party leaders go on the Sunday talk shows this weekend and denounce Democrats for protecting criminals? Will Jeb Bush hammer the issue on the campaign trail? Not likely.

The Radical Left has no problem raising poster children to sainthood status, no matter how outrageous the actual stories may be - see Trayvon Martib, Sandra Fluke, Michael Brown, Cindy Sheehan, etc. Or most recently, there is Ahmed Mohammed, but we'll come back to him shortly. At the end of the day even though Conservative principles are superior, those of the radical Left have been winning because they do a better job of messaging, and part of that is storytelling. Individual stories help to humanize complex issues, and if the Republicans can't use this to make the case you have to wonder why they bother to exist.
Meanwhile, Rebecca Reynolds Yonker reports over at the AP about a school district in Tennessee that will be closing because it can't afford its new Obamacare premiums:

Classes in a small, financially struggling school district in northern Tennessee have been canceled until officials can find a way to generate more revenue.Clay County Director of Schools Jerry Strong said the school board made the decision Thursday night after struggling with budget concerns for three years. He said the district doesn't have enough money to pay for partially unfunded government mandates.
"Clay County's inability to generate the revenue to offset the mandates is what's caused this to come to a head," he said. "The straw that broke the camel's back was really the Affordable Care Act for us and it has made it very difficult for us to have our employees properly covered and meet the mandates of the law. That was going to require new revenue and the commission felt like they couldn't do that through a tax increase."
"The choice was to either close schools and deal with this now or keep schools open and spend ourselves until we have nothing in our fund balance at all," he said.
"This is a poor, rural county and we already have the seventh-highest property tax rate in the whole state of Tennessee," he said. "Our property taxes, they're high enough."

This is just one of many, many stories of people who have been hurt by this piece of legislative date-rape that the Radical Left forced onto the American people. You don't think when serious talks of repeal emerge the left won't be prepared with some sob story of someone who would die without Obamacare? There are many different stories and angles showing the negative impact of the law - guess which one story is the one that will be repeated over and over?
Next up, Governor Mark Dayton decided to lecture his citizens at a talk for the NAACP on accepting more immigrants. Powerline's John Hinderaker weighs in:

From the start of the event, Dayton bluntly stated his opinions on the racial tension in St. Cloud and across the state in regards to immigration.“Look around you. This is Minnesota,” Dayton said. “Minnesota is not like it was 30, 50 years ago. But, this is Minnesota and you have every right to be here. And anybody who cannot accept your right to be here and this is Minnesota should find another state.”
Dayton said he was aware of some of the racial issues happening in the St. Cloud area and urged participants to take a stand against what he described as “unacceptable, un-Minnesotan, illegal and immoral” behavior.
“If you are that intolerant, if you are that much of a racist or a bigot, then find another state. Find a state where the minority population is 1 percent or whatever. It’s not that in Minnesota. It’s not going to be again. It’s not going to be that in St. Cloud, or Rochester or Worthington,” Dayton said.…
Dayton said many organizations are providing assistance to those who are arriving in Minnesota. But he said the key reason many immigrants choose to come to Minnesota is because of the jobs Minnesota provides.
Really? The data suggest otherwise:
Even though Minnesota has a good job market, that doesn’t seem to have translated into jobs for the Somali refugees. Minnesota’s state demographer’s office reports that only 41 percent of Somali men are working and 54 percent of Somali women are employed, meaning many may rely on the state’s handouts to survive, and are more susceptible to extremists’ pull. Minnesota has one of the nation’s most lavish welfare systems. Dayton’s rant continued:
“Our economy cannot expand based on, white, B+, Minnesota-born citizens. We don’t have enough,” Dayton said.
Wow. Those “white, B+ Minnesota-born citizens” just can’t cut it anymore. Can anyone imagine a politician of any stripe making a remotely comparable remark about citizens of any other race? And Dayton is talking about his own constituents: over 80% of Minnesotans are white, and the proportion of voters is higher. Dayton won’t run for governor again, so, like lots of other Democrats, he is taking the gloves off.

Hinderaker raises serious questions about these remarks:

Two questions remain: first, what did Dayton mean by the “B+” reference? I think it derives from Garrison Keillor, the leftist who for years has found a home on public radio. All Minnesotans, as Keillor says, are “above average”–B+, in Dayton’s account.Second, why didn’t Dayton’s racist rant get more publicity? Because not many people read the St. Cloud Times. A great many people, on the other hand, read the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Strib did report on Dayton’s St. Cloud adventure, but its account was carefully sanitized. No “love immigration or leave Minnesota” rhetoric, and above all, no reference to the “white, B+, Minnesota-born citizens” who can no longer sustain our economy. The Strib knows the first rule of journalism: the job of a reporter is to run interference for the Democratic Party.

This is exactly the sort of story that should be broadcast loud and clear. Leftists will sneer at us as they wave their finger and lecture us about helping other, but get damned quiet when you ask how many of these refugees they're inviting into their own homes or at least suggesting that a refugee center be put in their own neighborhoods. It's not difficult to demonstrate the hypocrisy and contempt that most leftists have for this country and it's values. Maybe it would be a good idea to go on the offensive and point out to the people the politicians and propaganda outlets who despise them so?
And finally, back to Ahmed Mohammed, aka "The clock bomb boy". When the story first broke it created a nice little uproar in social media. And then the story sort of unraveled. Not only was this clock not an invention, but his family has a history of being Islamic agitators. As Mark Steyn wrote:(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...

What political correctness has wrought

Revolutionaries such as John Dewey, Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger, Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, all of whom waxed poetically about the Soviet Union, inspired progressive educational and social policies that weakened support for organized religion, marital fidelity and the family while empowering the state.
With the help of like-minded people in Hollywood, they hammered away at social conventions of all kinds. The weapons of choice were radical individualism and moral relativism, which they peddled on college campuses to credulous liberal faculty who passed it on to their students.
By the time the 1960s rolled around, with the advent of the pill, Playboy magazine and mass communications, Western civilization was ripe for takeover by a heretofore alien, ideology of limitless sex. Of course, people weren’t told about the downside of “free love” — the destruction of families, social chaos, the loss of freedom to disagree, and a tightening statist grip on economic and intellectual liberty.
In his masterful new book, “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage,” author Paul Kengor traces a direct line from the founders of communism to today’s liberal social “reformers.”
The elements change with the times, but not the ultimate objective, which is to “progress” indefinitely toward an evolved, socialist Eden where all is shared and all are equal. Mr. Kengor notes that the progressive canon changes rapidly, and in ways that even progressives cannot always predict.
“But we do know this much: what is seemingly inconceivable to all of us right now, including to progressives themselves, may become the dogmatic position of progressives in a generation,” he writes.

Pilot is Informed Family of Fallen Soldier is on His Plane; But They Never Thought He’d do This

The Tea Party is not DEAD...just waiting!

The left chortled on Monday after learning the results of a new Gallup poll showing an all-time low for Tea Party support. According to Gallup, just 17 percent of Americans say they support the Tea Party, with 24 percent calling themselves opponents and 54 percent saying they have no opinion.

The poll’s high water mark for the Tea Party stood at 32 percent in November 2010. Oddly, the drop-off has been steepest among conservative Republicans, who have dropped from 63 percent support to 42 percent support from 2010 to 2015. Moderate or liberal Republicans never really supported the Tea Party; just 32 percent supported the Tea Party as of 2010, and that number has now dropped to 17 percent.

What happened?

The establishment Republican Party went to war with the Tea Party, over and over again.

Unlike the Democratic Party, which has a useful habit of coopting the left’s hardcore popular grassroots movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, the right has an unfortunate habit of disassociating from its popular uprisings. Almost from the outset, Republican insiders seemed uncomfortable with the Tea Party movement, believing it to be a reflection of anger that could blow back on them.

The Republican higher-ups flirted with the Tea Party long enough to win victory in November 2010, then promptly foisted on the Tea Party a 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, who invented Barack Obama’s central big government plank, Obamacare; blasted Senator

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

96%

as an outsider hell-bent on destroying the possibility of presidential victory for opposing Obamacare in 2013; and assured donors that only a softer tack on illegal immigration could open the possibility of Republican victory in 2016.

In 2014, the Tea Party once again showed up to vote in large numbers for Republicans, and Republicans catered to them, promising to end President Obama’s executive amnesty. The result: another historic victory. As soon as the election ended, however, Republicans recanted and funded Obama’s program, as well as Planned Parenthood.

Most recently, after Tea Party members moved to oust Speaker of the House

Rep. John Boehner (R-OH)

37%

, establishment types lamented Boehner’s fall, then tried to replace him with

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)

45%

. Only when the Freedom Caucus, a Tea Party-infused subset of the Republican caucus, finally settled on

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)

58%

were the establishment gods appeased.

For now. The next step in the establishment battle is Ryan’s deification, an attempt to force consolidated support behind him rather than behind a conservative agenda. The incoming Speaker has nothing to say, apparently, about a new deal with the Obama White House guaranteeing a debt limit increase and budget for the next two years, taking Republicans beyond the 2016 election. The deal would reportedly raise spending across the board, including funding of Planned Parenthood, funding for Medicare, and reauthorization of the crony Export-Import Bank.

And yet Ryan is nowhere to be seen in these negotiations, according to The Hill; he’s content to let Boehner do his dirty work, picking up accolades for his leadership all the way.

The Tea Party launched in an attempt to take the country back from overarching government. As such, its popularity ran both broad and deep among conservatives. Then the Republican Party began chipping away. When the two worked together in tandem, as in 2010 and 2014, the Republicans won; then, after every battle, the Republican establishment labeled the Tea Party a bunch of kooks, demanded full control, and proceeded to alienate the supporters who helped drive the Party to victory.

There is a reason that Romney bewailed the rise of the Tea Party-friendly alternative media while discussing politics with Obama operative David Axelrod: “There are more and more who feel they are insurgent than towards the center of the party…I think that divisiveness is one of the things that has led to Washington having such a hard time getting things done.”

The result: the siphoning away of energy from the only grassroots conservative movement in three decades.

Ejected from the levers of power by the Republican establishment, Tea Partiers have moved away from their disorganized campaign of providing informal support to Republicans more broadly, and have instead infiltrated into grassroots-friendly presidential campaigns from Donald Trump to Ben Carson to Cruz. In the process, their population has purportedly shrunk, but their power has not waned.

Look for it to wax again as the presidential race moves forward. The Tea Party was born in dissatisfaction with intransigent government and willful politicians. They may have bled away into the woodwork, but they’re not gone permanently. When the time comes, the Tea Party will be back with a vengeance, to the evident discomfort of all the same Republican establishment members who disliked it in the first place.